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4th of July, 1913https://tacomahistory.live/2019/05/22/4th-of-july-1913/
https://tacomahistory.live/2019/05/22/4th-of-july-1913/#respondThu, 23 May 2019 03:55:46 +0000http://tacomahistory.live/?p=15785This parade float photo taken near 21st and Pacific Avenue seems innocent, patriotic and elaborately decorative in the style that late Victorians loved. The glass plate negative photo (note the chipped glass corner) is a trove of historical details and suggestions from the last few years before the onslaught of the First World War and the coming of the automobile.

The twin team, horse drawn float is sponsored by the Tacoma chapter of the Ladies of the GAR (Grand Army of the Republic), the Civil War veterans organization that was reaching the end of its member’s lifetimes. A young woman with a Statue of Liberty headdress stands atop the dome ringed by ladies who presumably lived through the great war on the Union side. But what is not enblazened on the banners and signs is the political statement in their crisp white dresses. Women in Tacoma and then Washington State had achieved suffrage in 1909 and 1910 but the struggle was still on the for the 19th amendment guaranteeing all American women the right to vote. White was the color of the political fight for suffrage and these ladies were very much in warrior mode on this overcast 4th of July.

The 4th of July had particular historical meaning in Tacoma. No patriotic or political orator would have dared belt out an unamplified speech without mentioning that the first celebration

Ex Ex Map of Commencement Bay, 1841

of American Independence Day held in the Pacific Northwest was near Steilacoom in 1841 by the American Exploring Expedition. At the time the entire Oregon territory including Washington, Western Montana and the Idaho panhandle was held by the British and the Americans under a joint occupation treaty and throwing a party for gaining independence from the King of England was a bit cheeky. The U.S. Expedition mapped the entire Puget Sound region and named almost every island, harbor, mountain and geological feature they came across beginning with Commencement Bay. Five year later the boundary with British empire Canada was settled at the 49th parallel and the territory mapped by the U.S. explorers became American soil.

There is a suggestion of darkness in this photograph as well and it is steeped in the history of the Civil War. Ironically the costumed and hooded horses pulling the celebration of the Union Army ‘s victory are almost identical to the horses that carried the hooded riders in a motion picture that

Still shot from Birth of a Nation, 1915

was made by Southern born D.W. Griffith just a year later. The film was Birth of a Nation (1915) and it lionized the rise of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War and the defeat of the Confederate army. The three hour epic film triggered a revival of the KKK that was centered in the mid west and even the Pacific Northwest in the late teens and twenties.

The photo also is unique for its architectural background. All of the sturdy brick masonry buildings in the distance are still standing and in use more than a century later. If the DAR float was reaching the end of its Pacific Avenue parade route today it would have passed by Union Station (that was also there in 1913 having been completed in 1911), the University of Washington Tacoma Campus and the reused warehouses that are becoming the Brewery Blocks. For all the social changes, struggles and adjustments to 20th Century modernity that were just ahead for these Tacomans, some things would indeed stay the same.

Photo: Washington State Historical Society, Catalog Id: 2012.0.338

]]>https://tacomahistory.live/2019/05/22/4th-of-july-1913/feed/0WSHS parade.entacomahistorybirth-of-a-nation-hi-resBeaux-Arts Bones, Part IIhttps://tacomahistory.live/2019/04/21/beaux-arts-bones-part-ii/
https://tacomahistory.live/2019/04/21/beaux-arts-bones-part-ii/#commentsSun, 21 Apr 2019 22:34:21 +0000http://tacomahistory.live/?p=15754Continuing story about the influence and legacy of Beaux-Arts architecture and urban design on Tacoma at the turn of the 20th Century……..

During the world fair exposition era of the 1890’s through the beginning of the First World War Beaux-Arts design was blending into a uniquely American version of public architecture and city planning. In Tacoma, the influence shaped an important chapter in the city’s history, appearance and architectural aspirations. Many of Tacoma’s most prominent and valued landmarks date from the Beaux-Arts era…………

TACOMA U.S. POST OFFICE, COURT HOUSE AND CUSTOMS HOUSE b.1908-10

As early as 1906 there were promises of a block long Federal Building downtown complete with architectural plans in the grand Renaissance Revival style. But work on the building did not start until two years later. The influence of world fair’s trying to outdo Chicago’s Great White City was obvious in the impressive granite and sandstone Federal Building that finally began construction in September 1908.

The building was planned to serve as Tacoma’s central post office, home to the Federal Courts and offices and the U.S. Customs house just across the 11th Street Bridge from the busy port (the bridge was under construction at the same time). Its heavy stone masonry construction was in stark contrast to the near identical examples built along the prominades and waterways of the World Expositions. They were built from light stick frame and skim coat plaster and straw like backlot Hollywood movie sets.

Tacoma, Seattle (1909, razing in 1950s), Spokane (1909) and Yakima (1912) all saw Federal Buildings constructed during the City Beautiful era, all in a near identical style as enforced by James Knox Taylor, Supervising Architect of the United States Department of the Treasury. The years long delay in building Tacoma’s Federal building was in part due to local insistence that local Wilkeson sandstone be used. In the end, mid-Westerner Taylor approved funding from the U.S. Treasury for the Tacoma building but it was constructed by a Spokane contractor using “foreign” Indiana Limestone.

UNION STATION b. 1909-11

No piece of Tacoma’s architectural legacy is more embedded in Beaux-Arts design and the City Beautiful movement than Union Station designed by Reed & Stem in 1909 and completed in 1911. For a city born with the coming of the transcontinental railroad just after the Civil War, it was a long wait for a grand passenger terminal- a secular cathedral in terms of scale and civic prominence. When the Northern Pacific finally commissioned the depot from the same architects that designed Grand Central Station in New York, Portland had just finished hosting the Lewis & Clark Exposition and Seattle was about to open the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition. The cities of the American west were moving the world’s compass needle toward the Pacific and Asia and the Eurocentric view of the world’s marvels was shifting. Tacoma cleared whole blocks of industrial land and vacated busy 19th street to accomodate a new railway station, concourse and multiple sidings for travelers, postal freight and modern wire and telegraph service. The deal required the railroad to build with architectural meaning and high design standards and the NP went all out with a domed, distinctly Beaux Arts structure.

In the two years between Reed & Stem creating the design for the Northern Pacific Passenger Station and the opening of Tacoma’s Union Station a lot happened on the corporate level. J.J. Hill, the mastermind behind the Great Northern Railroad, gained control of the NP and in so doing established a pathway for his own transcontinental line to reach Tacoma. Meanwhile, the Union Pacific Railroad had reached Portland from the bay area and was eyeing the passenger and freight business from Puget Sound. The building tells the story with the NP monad (ying/yang logo) branded into the arched window mullions and the electric sign letters UNION STATION, cleared added on to the original design indicating that the depot served more than one railroad line.

But the small details at Union Station are secondary to the overall architectural style and formal Beaux Arts features of the treasured structure. During the golden age of world expositions, the architectural centerpieces were often capped by domes, invoking the Pantheon in Rome and Brunelleschi’s Renaissance masterpiece Doma of Florence Cathedral. The incorporation of a copper dome roof above the glazed arches on Tacoma’s passenger station was a high dive into Beaux Arts design and the further embellishment with French cartouches added a full twist. Train stations were the gateways to the great world’s fairs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and they were often the most lasting legacies of the events. Within months after the Columbian Exposition, virtually all of the great white city was demolished or erased by fire. In Tacoma, the pieces of legacy from the Beaux-Arts period have survived and none is more important to the city’s identity, then and now, than Union Station.

WASHINGTON STATE HISTORICAL MUSEUM b.1911

During the Beaux-Arts boomtime downtown, the Clinton Ferry Historical Museum moved its curious collections out of the the County Courthouse to a new, academically NeoClassical building on the southern lip of the dramatic stadium being carved out of

WSHS Museum above stadium & high school

the hillside next to Tacoma High School. By 1910, the Victorian mansions and high Queen Anne style homes along Tacoma’s North End streetcar lines were becoming surrounded by more mellow, picturesque homes out of the City Beautiful catalog. The new formally pedimented exhibit hall would become the Washington State Historical Museum, and together with the stadium and Chateauesque high school, would look like an architectural ensemble cut right from the grounds of an international world’s fair exposition. A streetcar ride to Point Defiance Park and the Japanese Pagoda (1914) station made the world fair reference. Beyond the breathtaking setting and architectural surroundings, the interior displays and collections at the museum were right out of the world fair pavilions including ethnographic objects and panoramic artworks that were displays at the Columbian, Lewis & Clark and Alaska Yukon Pacific expositions.

Training at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris was the loftiest credential for architects during the World Exposition/City Beautiful period. Notable in Tacoma’s stadium neighborhood are the Rust Mansion designed by Ambrose Russell, who also completed the Governor’s Mansion in time the AYP in 1909 and the residence at 802 north Yakima Avenue designed by Kirkland Cutter, who designed State Buildings for the Columbian and St. Louis Expositions as well as Thornwood on American Lake. Both men were Ecole de Beaux-Arts trained.

ELKS BUILDING & SPANISH STEPS b. 1915-16

In Tacoma, there’s no deeper dive into pure Beaux-Arts design in the world fair context that the Elks Building and interwoven

Elks Lodge & Spanish Steps

Spanish Steps, designed by the Paris born American architect Edouard Frere Champney. Ending where this story began in the shadow of Tacoma City Hall, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks Tacoma Lodge No. 174 is perhaps the city’s purest expressions from the era of Great White Cities, idealized architectural Classicism and beautiful urban compositions. When the building and public stairs opened in February 1916, Tacoma and the international scene were about to change. The world was turning from expositions and fairgrounds to warfare and battlefields. Cities were beginning to think about vertical engineering, skyscrapers and the convenience and isolation of personal motor vehicles. The importance of a shared public realm with graceful open spaces, human scaled architecture, parks and landscapes, and occasional marvels was beginning to wane.

Tacoma last important gesture to the legacy created by the Beaux-Arts movement was almost old fashion before it was finished. Both the Tacoma (1910) and Perkins (1907-10) Buildings at 11th and A streets were using steel frame and reinforced concrete construction to climb above 10 stories and push up the skyline. Tacoma’s downtown core was rapidly increasing in physical height and architectural density as roads and highways spread neighborhoods beyond the familiar network of sidewalks and streetcars. The landmarks from the Beaux-Arts era became scattered across a city looking for freeway on ramps and free parking spaces. Scattered but not lost.

One way to look at Tacoma’s architectural history is to imagine its Beaux-Arts landmarks as an assemblage–as buildings and sites built within a short period of time, upon a planned landscape designed for people and their enjoyment of the surroundings. Imagine these buildings and landscapes as pieces of special time and particular place, like they floated away from a compact master plan but still reflect a sense of balance between the city’s past and future. Its as if an entire chapter in Tacoma’s history is on exhibition, a Tacoma World Fair.

]]>https://tacomahistory.live/2019/04/21/beaux-arts-bones-part-ii/feed/1Chi1893tacomahistory2923612150unionStation.4.wshs.entacoma063.encartouche.entacoma058WSHS.Stadium.aerial.enRichards_Studio_D932012.WSHSElks.cartouche.1Elks.cartouche.3Beaux-Arts Bones, Part Ihttps://tacomahistory.live/2019/04/13/beaux-arts-bones-part-i/
https://tacomahistory.live/2019/04/13/beaux-arts-bones-part-i/#commentsSat, 13 Apr 2019 23:17:41 +0000http://tacomahistory.live/?p=15733One way to look at Tacoma’s early shaping and pattern language is as a series of theatre set changes, some of which completely replaced the scene before and some of which left behind pieces of their time-like souvenirs. Tacoma raced through its first stage acts when the Northern Pacific transcontinental railroad chose Commencement Bay for its Pacific Ocean terminal less than a decade after the Civil War. The frontier wooden city that emerged in 1873 with the arrival of the first tracks, locomotives and telegraph was quickly erased and upstaged by the brick and stone city that appeared after the Stampede Pass tunnel was completed in 1888. As the population exploded (from 1,098 in 1880 to 36,006 in 1890) and the city limits expanded, the appearance and formality of the built environment became more refined and in tune with period tastes in architecture and city planning.

Maybe the loftiest chapter in Tacoma’s architectural shaping began about 1893 and ran up to the First World War. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared that the American frontier was conquered and over in a speech at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition and by Armistice Day on November 11, 1918 American cities were being shape-shifted by skyscrapers and motorcars. In between, Tacoma, like many of America’s established cities, became fascinated by the phenomena of World Fairs and International Expositions where whole dream cities were built like movie sets and the latest technologies and inventions were on display amid romantic, Disneyland before Disney landscapes.

Glowing, illuminated cities of Oz attracted millions of visitors to Chicago (Columbian Exposition, 1893), Buffalo (Pan-American Exposition, 1901), St. Louis (Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904), Portland (Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, 1905) Seattle (Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, 1909) and San Francisco (Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915). They marveled at everything from flying machines to ferris wheels but mostly American’s bought into a new set of ideals for what cities should look like. The “City Beautiful” movement was part future and part past, NeoClassical architecture wired for incandescent lights, telephones and indoor plumbing set within parklands and landscaped boulevards. Gazing into the 20th Century, monumental civic buildings and public realm spaces were visualized as timeless expressions of classical civilization and fine art. Greek revival columns and pediments, Romanesque arches and domes and Italian Renaissance friezes and carved sculptural decorations became the measure of important public architecture and beautiful cities. In romantic language- Beaux-Arts.

Chicago Columbian Exposition 1893

TACOMA CITY HALL, b.1893

Tacoma’s ties to the golden era of world expositions, and American Beaux-Arts design can be linked with Frederick Law Olmsted, who developed the city’s first master plan in 1873 and 20 years later laid out the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893. But Tacoma’s first and most lasting architectural expression of public Beaux-Arts design is City Hall, completed in 1893. The towering, honey colored brick building used Italianate forms and rooflines that are elaborately decorated with curved brackets, a classical deep relief frieze and tall deep set windows to accentuate the height and prominence of the building. For a generation before steel frame construction and high rise skyscrapers, Tacoma’s City Hall loomed over the downtown to the south and Commencement Bay to the North. In partnership with the turreted Northern Pacific Railway Building across Pacific Avenue (b. 1888), the two examples of NeoClassical Beaux-Arts design anchored Tacoma’s Beautiful City aspirations at the turn of the 20th Century.

TACOMA PUBLIC LIBRARY, b.1903

Libraries were quintessential elements in the City Beautiful movement and once Tacoma recovered from an economic lull during the mid 1890’s, a major push was made to build in the high Beaux Arts style. In contrast to the adjacent rusticated stone Pierce County Courthouse, the Tacoma Carnegie Library (first public library in Washington State

funded by industrialist Andrew Carnegie) was highly formal and embellished with the exterior and interior finishes that typified Beaux-Arts design. Perched on a stone base ground floor, the building lifted to a cream colored, smooth brick upper level with rows of Romanesque arched windows and a copper domed roof and skylight that illuminated a theatrical polished marble stairway and grand public reading room. When the library opened in June 1903, the 2000 books that made up Puget Sound’s first circulating library were moved from City Hall into elegant spaces that reflected the galleries of the world fair pavilions and exhibition halls.

Public Reading Room, Tacoma Public Library ca. 1904. Photo TPL 4082

Public Reading Room, Tacoma Public Library ca. 1904. Photo TPL 4607

PYTHIAN TEMPLE, B.1906

Churches and religious buildings rarely incorporated the worldly conversions of Beaux-Arts design but fraternal clubs and assembly halls often embraced the stylistic ideals. The most elaborate example in Tacoma was the Pythian Temple, designed by Frederick Heath in 1905-6 at the same time he was completing work on Tacoma (Stadium) High School. The building blended many of the classical Renaissance revival details into a facade that fit tightly into a busy downtown streetscape. The stone faced lower floors displayed the same, exaggerated horizontal mortar lines as the Public Library and above a cornice line, arched windows and a row of columns flanked by pediments clearly signal a public building with temple ambitions. But it’s the remarkable interior, particularly the main assembly space, that projects the building’s Beaux-Arts design and full on exhibitionism. After 110 years, the interior of the Pythian Temple is the closest anyone can come today to walking into a World Fair exposition gallery with soaring cross vaulted ceilings and skylights, a running visitor balcony supported by massive gracefully carved brackets (they are faux wood painted plaster), classically ordered columns and pilasters and an overwhelming sense of heroic scale.

]]>https://tacomahistory.live/2019/04/13/beaux-arts-bones-part-i/feed/1union-station-1911.entacomahistory18tjwwjuy12w4jpgChi1893TPL.wshsGeneral_Photograph_Collection_TPL4082.en.1General_Photograph_Collection_TPL460792426_BROADWAY_TACOMA_BU10716_date_1922.en92426_BROADWAY_TACOMA_BU12218_date_08061926.enunion-station-1911A Piece of the Worldhttps://tacomahistory.live/2019/04/09/a-piece-of-the-world/
https://tacomahistory.live/2019/04/09/a-piece-of-the-world/#commentsTue, 09 Apr 2019 23:16:52 +0000http://tacomahistory.live/?p=15716When the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks decided to conduct a design competition to select an architect for their new Tacoma Lodge Building they probably hoped for a world class designer with old world design sensibilities, world’s fair experience and a portfolio of world famous public buildings. When the fourteen competition entries arrived in early summer 1914, the Elks got everything they hoped for and then some.
The Elks lodge site at the far right before construction

While the various schemes for the new lodge offered an array of brick and stone buildings that looked like everything from a secular cathedral to a commercial office building, one set of drawings proposed an ensemble of Beaux Arts styling that included a striking ivory colored temple set into a refined landscape and accompanied by an elaborate, illuminated hillside stairway. The grouping invoked the high style decorations of the Gilded Age. Its crisp color and accommodation to passing pedestrians and streetcar boulevards borrowed from the grand strolling expositions and world fairs of the time. And its cutting edge fireproof construction, using cast marble (fancy concrete) imparted a permanence that matched Tacoma’s most important public buildings and architectural ambitions. The jury’s selection was unanimous and so enthusiastic that they increased the cost of the project from $85,000 to a hundred grand before the final construction drawings were even finished.

The architect who created the design was Edouard Frere Champney, a 39 year old cosmopolitan with a degree from Harvard and full certificates in art and architecture

Edouard Frere Champney

from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Champney was a character from another era, an aesthetic from the Victorian age, born to a travel writer mother and artist father who were living as American expats in an artists commune in Paris. In 1876 James Wells Champney and his wife Elizabeth returned to her pre-revolutionary family home, Elmstead Manor in Deerfield, Massachusetts where Edouard and his younger sister Marie grew up. In 1900 Champney completed his studies and joined the architectural firm of Carrere and Hastings in Buffalo, New York just as they were beginning work as principal designers for the Pan American Exposition. The young architect’s emersion in the planning of a world’s fair would shape his approach to design and the physical world he could create. Instead of drawing free standing buildings as single objects, Champney seemed to imagine pieces of the world, elements of a larger composition that seemed to work and belong together.

Planning the Pan American Exposition 1901

During the first decade of the new century Champney became a specialist in designing world expositions and grand layouts. By 1903 he was in Washington D.C. working for Hornblower and Marshall on the design of the Smithsonian Buildings (he drafted the blueprints for the the National Museum of the Natural History). The next year he became Assistant Chief Architect for the Louisiana Purchase St. Louis Exposition, in St. Louis, Missouri where he was responsible for the transportation and agriculture buildings as well as the overall landscape and grounds. From there he moved west, working on the master planning for the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland and then on to Seattle for the Alaskan Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYP held in 1909) where he was designated Chief Architect in 1907.

Edouard Champney lived in the era and style of grand hotels, elegant ocean crossing steamships and first class railway passage. When his mother came to live with him in Seattle they occupied a suite of rooms in the old world charm of the Sorento Hotel on Capitol Hill. For the next 15 years it would be their base as Elizabeth traveled the world in summers and wrote books about romantic and distant places while her son (who she called Frere) practiced architecture and illustrated her books.

After an ill fated business partnership with Augustus Warren Gould, which led to the triumph of the landmark 10 story Rogers Building in Vancouver B.C. and an embarrassing faux pas trying to design the Seattle Municipal Building, Campney returned to designing expositions. In November 1912, he was selected as the principal designer and Chief Architect of the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. It was while working between Seattle and the bay area on the Panama Pacific Exposition in celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal, that Champney drew his plans for the Tacoma Elks Lodge. His entry in the Tacoma competition caught many by surprise since work on the San Francisco fair seemed all consuming of his time and presence. He was a celebrity in both California and Seattle and his winning entry in the Elks competition was widely published in newspapers and magazine internationally. He may have understood that the ensemble of public architecture and boulevards imagined by Frederick Law Olmsted in his 1873 plan for Tacoma was missing a piece.

The era of world fairs and international expositions was coming to an end as the First World War spread across Europe and the United States flirted with involvement. The “City Beautiful” movement, that was launched with the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893 and which inspired the Italian Renaissance design of Tacoma’s City Hall, was becoming overshadowed by skyscrapers and densely packed city skylines. (Ironically Edouard’s father James Wells Champney was killed in a high rise elevator accident) Elegant prominades and boulevards were being run over by double tracked streetcars and automobiles. The great white cities of dreams imagined by Frederick Law Olmsted, Daniel Burnham, John Wellborn Root and Edouard Frere Champney were proving to be temporary illusions, fragmentary in their realization and endurance.

Edouard Champney’s last exposition and the completion of the Tacoma Elks project happened about the same time and for the next few years he traveled and worked with Elizabeth on three gilt edged, illustrated books about the romance of Old Japan, Russia and Belgium. She passed away in Seattle in October 1922. At 48 years of age Edouard married Mary Alice Robbins and they left Seattle for a home in Berkeley, California. When the San Francisco architectural firm of Bakewell and Brown was selected to design the new Episcopal cathedral in Seattle they hired Edouard Champney as their managing architect. Champney returned to Seattle for the ground-breaking of Saint Mark’s Cathedral in 1928 but did not live to see its completion. Champney died at 54 on April 6, 1929.

Thanks to Russell Holter and Jeffrey Ochsner for research and background on Edouard Frere Champney

On a summer day sometime around 1920 this small ensemble of actors played out the last act in a drama that involved an automotive miscalculation. Based on the expressions and posture of the driver and passenger, the wreck seems to have been a source of entertainment for the travelers and a source of temporary employment for the roadside wreckers.

The damaged glass plate image is a study in visual storytelling and photographic composition even though the people and location are unknown. It’s a road movie without motion. The modern paved road establishes a perfect vanishing point in the distance where the sharp road edges and sparse forest of conifers and telephone poles all taper to a long perspective.

The action veered off the centerline into a brushy ditch, stage left, but that part of the story has already unfolded.

It’s the upturned coupe and scattered car parts and tools that fill in the first crashing act in the story. The well dressed couple seem both relieved and amused in their cheeky body language and proud smiles. They add the story arc, mystery and central characters to the episode. At first glance they look like big game hunters posing with their trophy. With a replacement limousine already waiting they seem to be making a photo-op visit to the site, carefree of cost and consequences.

The right side of the photo is more real, slightly upstage, larger and closer to the photographer and audience. The hard work and heavy lifting ahead are acted out by the two workers and their shadowy third partner, just out of sight. The jagged, cracked emulsion on the photograph hangs over their heads like a theatrical dark balloon- an accidental metaphor for the little roadside disaster.

But what makes this century old black and white photograph worth looking at closely is the wonderful story it presents, the drama and humor it suggests and the people it introduces in their own unique place and time. It is indeed like a movie in a single frame full of cinematic language and clues. Such a satisfying thing to watch, beginning to end.

Midtown Tacoma on Tuesday April 14th 1925. Marvin Boland was up early with his large format camera on the second floor or roof of one of the low rise buildings on the east side of Pacific Avenue and 10th Street. The morning shadow of the scandalous Scandinavian American Bank Building divided the sunlight on a block of businesses in buildings that predated the hurried automobile age. These two and three story buildings were typical, if perhaps a bit smaller, than the tightly packed brick and stone facades that lined Tacoma’s most important boulevard and streetcar line. By the mid 1920’s, automobiles, buses and delivery truck were dodging in and out of the streetcars and beginning to change the daily patterns of the busy downtown. The hand laid brick and cut stone masonry commercial buildings from the railroad days were being overshadowed and dwarfed by the steel frame Chicago style skyscrapers around them.

The 1920’s were prosperous years for Tacoma’s merchants and to have a midtown Pacific Avenue address, even in a turn of the century building, was still a sign of credibility and means. Between 9th and 13th Streets the Pacific Avenue streetscape was lined with specialty retail shops-haberdashers, watchmakers, cobblers and woolen tailors. Captured in Boland’s sharp glass plate negative photo that morning is a snapshot of Tacoma’s merchant class and enterprise at the edge of a changing time .

Same Block in 1926

Much can be gleaned from the type of businesses and signage, the ethnicity of the names in a time before big brands and fancy logos, and from their locations at street level or on the upper floors. There was a commercial coding to the block, a conversation in small change and folding money, a recognition of regular customers and smooth grifters. A stroll down the block headed north from left to right was a story.

The highest rent street level business was Lundquist-Lilly men’s clothing ion the new steel frame Rust Building on the corner of 11th. The hatter Charles F. Lewis was next door under a British style sign that carried his name across the entire 25 foot wide shop bay above a recessed entry and display windows. Haubert and Manning Billiards was one flight up above Scoby’s Juan De Fuca Cigar store, a barber shop and a lunch counter. This group of manly businesses shared a garish electric sign and created a

Merchant Buildings ca. 1920 with Rust Building under construction

pocket of leisure in an otherwise busy working retail district. Davis Men’s Shop and Haugen and Loney Tailors came next, both selling suits, overcoats, hats and city style clothes to men. Friedman’s Jeweler was tucked into a 15 foot wide storefront with an understated but elegant cut glass transom sign. The jeweler’s primary marker was an extravagant curbside street clock festooned with illuminated globes and a glass faced open clockworks. Since 19th Century railroad days, Tacoma was known for its jewelers, many of them German and Swiss jews who were either watchmakers or retail jewelers and gem dealers. The watchsmiths were the elite in a city created by the railroad where time tables and telegraphic time signals were fundamental to daily operation. The Northern Pacific expected every employee to have a watch that kept “good time”. Even the shop crews were extended credit to buy a watch when they were first hired by the NP. Another Billiard parlor run by Peterson and Cookie filled the second floor above Friedman’s in the little building.

The stone faced San Francisco Block came next and was the most storied building in the group. Designed by the legendary architect August Darmer in 1887, it began life as the optimistic National Bank of Commerce which failed in the economic crash of 1893. At opening, the San Francisco Block was the first home for Tacoma’s Elks Lodge on the upper floor along with Howe’s book bindery. In Boland’s 1924 photo the top floor middle left window reads: Hops and Klaber Inv. Co. suggesting a broker in beer contents even though prohibition was in effect at the time.

San Francisco Block, Boland April 14, 1924, cropped

Right next to the hop dealer on the top floor the window reads: Oriental Method and below: D.G. Chan. The top right window reads: Chinese Medicine. The two advertisements on either side say: Chinese Natural Method, Remedies, Cure, Acute- Chronic & Peculiar Diseases, Young & Old, Either Sex. Chinese Medicine Co., Doctor Will Tell Your Trouble, Consultation Free. With no elevator, the three story walk up probably led to very affordable office space for the practitioner in alternative medicine but the signage alone suggests a floor full of interesting odors and sounds.

The window signage on the second floor advertises Medical Dispensary; Genito-Urinary Diseases and next to that G. B. Aldrich, lawyer. Its a reminder that through the 1920’s and 30’s people came downtown daily for more than just shopping. The business of daily lives pulsed into and away from the downtown every hour. Teeth got pulled, wills were made out, land was bought and sold and insurance claims were filed every day in the upper floors along Pacific Avenue. It was a routine of streetcars, pedestrians and 3 to 5 story commercial walk up office buildings with ground floor retail on the east and west street fronts. Along this west side block the better retailers and upper floor entrance fronted on the Pacific Avenue streetcar line while the grittier businesses faced Commercial street on the rear.

About four years before the Boland photo, just as construction was starting on the Rust Building, the Regal Shoe Company opened on the ground floor of the San Francisco Building. They spent an astonishing $8000 finishing out their shop with carved hardwood cabinetry, special electric display lighting and a giant boot that hung over the sidewalk along with a gold leaf sign. In the years and decades to come none of the other merchants and upper floor professionals would last as long as Regal Shoes. During the war, the building was sold (for $85,000) and just after the war the Murphy’s Cigar Store next door was raided for gambling and “vice”. It got converted into a

San Francisco Block 1966

glass block fronted restaurant and cocktail lounge that was opened 24 hours a day and got raided again. Regal Shoes hung on into the late 1960’s, surviving as merchants on Pacific Avenue for almost half a century. In 1969 the group of buildings and businesses in Marvin Boland’s photograph were demolished to make way for a parking garage.

Demo of the merchants block 1969
]]>https://tacomahistory.live/2019/02/12/merchants-1925/feed/2Marvin_D_Boland_Collection_BOLANDB12319.entacomahistoryThis image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is marvin_d_boland_collection_bolandb3685.1920.jpgThe Legacyhttps://tacomahistory.live/2019/02/04/the-legacy/
https://tacomahistory.live/2019/02/04/the-legacy/#commentsTue, 05 Feb 2019 01:21:19 +0000http://tacomahistory.live/?p=15668On April 23, 1929 the Puyallup/Nisqually tribal statesman Henry Sicade took the witness stand in Superior Court Judge Frederick Reman’s courtroom on the upper floor of the towering Pierce County Courthouse in Tacoma. The respected Native American community leader and Fife valley farmer was a character witness in an extraordinary trial dealing with the last will and testament of John McAleer and the legacy he left to a 15 year old boy named Ray Yamamoto. For weeks the trial was front page news partly because the inheritance was valued at more than $200,000 including one of the valley’s most prominent estates. But more importantly, the will of pioneer John McAleer challenged the power of one of the most influential and feared politicians in America.

Pierce County Courthouse

Henry Sicade’s testimony was an account of his long friendship with John McAleer that began during the Prairie Line days of the 1880’s and ended with his death in May 1928. Over the years, the two partnered in buying back Puyallup reservation land, building farms in the rich Fife Valley and establishing working relationships with the area’s growing Japanese community. By the early 20th Century, they each owned hundreds of acres of farmland and together with largely Japanese and Italian farmers supplied a large share of Tacoma’s public market produce and flowers.

Henry Sicade shaking hands with Will Rogers, Tacoma ca. 1925

Reporters in the crowded courtroom noted the calm, veracious account Sicade gave of John McAleer’s iron willed determination to clear his land and convert a stump farm and dairy into some of the most productive vegetable growing farmland in the region. He also talked about the cooperative relationship he and tribal members developed with immigrant Japanese farmers who brought efficient agricultural methods and family ties to public markets in the city to the fertile farmland of the Puyallup Valley. By the 1920’s, McAleer Gardens was one of the largest vegetable growing enterprises in the Fife area. It was operated almost entirely by Japanese American farmers.

The Japanese born issei farmers leased or worked large tracts of land in the Fife Valley, including Puyallup tribal allotments and privately held farmland like Sicade’s and McAleer’s. As the land dedicated to vegetable farms grew in acreage during the first two decades of the 20th Century, the politics of immigration, citizenship and property ownership swirled around Fife and the Puyallup Valley.

Henry Sicade’s courtroom account went on to talk about how John McAleer built a gymnasium and schoolhouse on his land in Fife for the Japanese American community and how a young champion wrestler named Kichigoro (Kay) Yamamoto became a loyal farm manager and eventually a trusted member of the McAleer household. The story he was telling the judge and 12 member jury did not go uninterrupted. One of the front page newspaper accounts describes the courtroom scene and Sicade’s demeanor as “smiling and suave under a thundering barrage of cross examination and objections by Maurice Langhorne, counsel for the relatives, who seek to break McAleer’s will.”

Maurice Langhorne was a Tennessee born lawyer and political backroomer who had run for congress, served as prosecutor in Lewis County and established himself in Tacoma and the state house as a friend of power. In the years after the First World War, Washington’s legislature passed land laws specifically aimed at Japanese Americans, first outlawing property ownership and then, in 1921, making it a crime to sell, lease, rent or hold in trust property on behalf of aliens. Langhorne was a champion of the laws and the most vociferous organization backing them, the American Legion.

Later that year, Tacoma’s Congressman, Albert Johnson, who had ascended to the Chairmanship of the House Committee of Immigration and Naturalization, sponsored legislation in Congress that further limited immigration, travel and citizenship as a matter of Federal policy. The

U.S. Rep Albert Johnson

Johnson Quota Act that was passed in May 1921 established for the first time, numerical limits on immigration based on country of origin. Johnson fully embraced the then popular pseudoscience of eugenics and used his office to incorporate its principals into Federal immigration policy. On May 26th 1924, Representative Johnson steered the Reed-Johnson Immigration Act into federal law, ending immigration from Japan and most of Asia entirely. Citing the large population of Japanese in Tacoma and the Puyallup Valley, it became a matter of pride to Rep. Johnson that the immigration and land laws be strictly enforced in his Congressional district. Maurice Langhorne understood the importance of the McAleer trial to the Congressman and no doubt measured the political appreciation he would enjoy by blocking the inheritance intended for Kay Yamamoto.

But before Langhorne could confront Kay Yamamoto on the stand he had to diminish and discredit the testimony of Henry Sicade, the second to the last

Wesley Lloyd

witness called by the defense attorney Wesley Lloyd in the nearly month long trial. Sicade was proving to be a difficult witness for the attorney contesting the will as the quiet and restrained Lloyd led him through a series of answers and stories that described the long association and loyalty between Yamamoto and McAleer. Langhorne found it nearly impossible to rattle or confuse Sicade with his bellowing objections and digressive interruptions.

When the confident, mannered lawyer stepped from behind the counsel table and began his cross examination, he dove into a series of questions about McAleer’s whiskey drinking and diminished judgement due to alcohol. He implied Yamamoto had illegally supplied whiskey by the caseload to the old Irishman and manipulated him into turning over his property to a foreigner. The Japanese was breaking federal laws concerning prohibition and probate and his neighbors were indifferent to his plans to ignore Washington State laws outlawing the ownership of property by Japanese Americans.

Sicade was controlled in his response. In a clear, poignant voice he recognized that prohibition-era liquor was a paralyzing social problem that deeply affected his friends and people but that John McAleer was of sound mind when he wrote and signed his last will and testament. He went on to state that like John McAleer, he and other tribal land holders had trusted agreements with the Japanese farmers who could not own or hold farmland in their own name or that of their American born children. In an exchange of glances, both men realized the point Sicade had just landed.

The State and Federal land laws passed during the 1920’s to discourage immigrants and obstruct livelihoods for Japanese American families were preceded by native presence going back thousands of years. A natural law of ancient occupation had been recognized in the 1854-5 Medicine Creek Treaty between native people and the United State Government. For all the power and influence Congressman Johnson and his followers wielded in Washington D.C. and Olympia, Japanese American farmers and families were welcome on time honored tribal land in the Puyallup Valley.

Langhorne had no further questions for the witness. The following day Kay Yamamoto was called to the witness stand.

The Legacy, Part 2 is next……..

Notes:

Charles McClain, Japanese Immigrants and American Law: The Alien Land Laws and Other Issues (Garland Publishing Inc, New York, 1994) U.S. House of Representatives, Japanese Immigration, Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, part 4, hearings at Seattle and Tacoma, July-August, 1920, (Washington, 1921) Douglas W. Nelson, “The Alien Land Law Movement of the Late Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the West,1970, Vol. 9, Issue 1, 46 Mark Lazarus, “An Historical Analysis of Alien Land Law: Washington Territory and State: 1853-1889,”University of Puget Sound Law Review, Issue 12, 203

]]>https://tacomahistory.live/2019/02/04/the-legacy/feed/8Virna_Haffer_Collection_VHBOOK_137tacomahistoryThis image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is langhorn-obit.crop_.en_-4.jpgThis image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 800px-johnson_albert_congressman_loc_hec.07286.jpgThis image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is wesley_lloyd_washington_state_congressman.jpgYear Threehttps://tacomahistory.live/2019/01/07/year-three/
https://tacomahistory.live/2019/01/07/year-three/#commentsMon, 07 Jan 2019 19:13:25 +0000http://tacomahistory.live/?p=15665Well it’s the third anniversary of this TacomaHistory.wordpress blog. In the last year, 47 new stories have been added to the 317 total posts exploring the city’s further adventures, tragedies, triumphs and follies. We have continued to profile good people and bad and followed the events and misadventures of characters that both praise and dis this place we call home. This year we also dove into the mystery of people and places recorded in images without identities or context, a sort of lost persons investigation. The Clear As Glass series of photographs and portraits from a glass plate collection now held at the Washington State Historical Society drew a lot of interest and will be continued. 114,791 views have been recorded in 2018 bringing the site’s total since launch to 249,696. There have been hundreds of comments, corrections and scolds sent our way via the WordPress blog network, Facebook and Twitter.

As we have each year, we want to take a moment and recognize the vital role the Tacoma Public Library, Washington State Historical Society, University of Washington Digital Collections, HistoryLink and many other public archives play in telling our shared stories and understanding our collective past. I’m not sure wisdom or the better aspects of human nature are ever easy to recognize or find but if we want to go searching I think our shared history is a good place to start. It’s why we have memories and libraries and the stories we tell each other.

Some things to watch for in the coming year are more film, audio and media content in the stories. The search for backstories connected to individual pieces of the past will continue to be a lure as were the glass plate images in the Clear Series. And we have a backlog of biographies and architectural sketches to catch up on. Thanks for following TacomaHistory.live and if you have a comment, lead or object of interest to share it will certainly be appreciated.

]]>https://tacomahistory.live/2019/01/07/year-three/feed/1bakers.entacomahistoryUnforeseenhttps://tacomahistory.live/2019/01/07/unforeseen/
https://tacomahistory.live/2019/01/07/unforeseen/#commentsMon, 07 Jan 2019 18:01:06 +0000http://tacomahistory.live/?p=15661As extraordinary weather goes the winter of 1949-50 was cruising along as nothing special. In the days after World War Two, folks felt a new confidence in weather predictions and early warnings of approaching weather. As part of wartime military defenses, weather observation stations, atmospheric science and communications had been greatly advanced and converted to civilian service. But in January 1950, after weeks of frosty winter mornings and occasional snowflakes, there was no high tech weather pattern modeling like today, no weather satellites or cloud radar. Tacomans relied on radio weather reports and the predictions of newspaper weathermen. On the front page of the Tacoma News Tribune of Thursday January 12th, the Official U.S. Weather Report in the upper left corner read “Colder Tonight But Moderating By Tomorrow”.

“Break in Weather Forecast” was the headline below and the accompanying story quoted weatherman Ross Miller who reported it would drop down to between 20 and 25 degrees before warming up on Friday and turning to rain on Saturday. That’s not what happened.

Thanks to Mick Flaaen and Mariposa Productions for the mini documentary. Its part of the Tacoma Home Movies series.

The film footage was discovered in the Tacoma Elks Lodge archives and in the Celmer family collection of 8mm films. The still photographs from the Richards Collection are held by the Tacoma Public Library.

]]>https://tacomahistory.live/2019/01/07/unforeseen/feed/2richards_studio_d47377_3.olympustacomahistoryRalphie’s Old Manhttps://tacomahistory.live/2018/12/21/ralphies-old-man/
https://tacomahistory.live/2018/12/21/ralphies-old-man/#respondSat, 22 Dec 2018 01:43:39 +0000http://tacomahistory.live/?p=15650The actor Darren McGavin was born with the unremarkable real name William Richardson in 1922 into a very rocky family. By the mid 1930’s, the heart of the great Depression, his parents were divorced and he was living with family friends on a farm outside Tacoma. He ran away a couple times, stayed with a native Nisqually family for awhile and then lived on his own until his traveling salesman father tracked him down and settled him at the Jessie Dyslin’s Boys’ Ranch. He was 13 years old. He lived at the boys ranch in Tacoma for more than three years until he was 16 and rode out the worst

Darren McGavin in Death of a Salesman, 1950

years of the Great Depression in the crowded but safe surroundings of the ranch. He also developed a lifelong affection for the seaport city. Eventually the boy drifted to California and by the end of the Second World War he was painting scenery at Columbia Studios in Hollywood. Like a scene in a movie he tried out for a small part in a big budget film starring Cornel Wilde as Frederick Chopin and Merle Oberon as George Sand. A Song to Remember (1945) made Darren McGavin an actor and he went on to perform in theatre on Broadway, work his way up as a movie star and eventually become a familiar character on television.

In October 1967 the Dyslin’s Boys Ranch opened the South Tacoma Value Village Thrift store as a means of support and McGavin attended as a celebrity alumni. He brought with him a collection of auction items donated by Hollywood

friends like Bob Hope, Henry Fonda, Steve McQueen, Barbara Streisand and Red Skelton. His visit “back home to Tacoma”, as he called it, was no small event in the city. He received a key to the city from Mayor Harold Tollefson and charmed dinner guests with a story about his first starring role in a movie. It was made by the boys at the Dyslin Ranch in the 1930’s where he took a fall off a bucking cow for the camera. By the mid 1960’s McGavin had played in films like Summertime with Katherine Hepburn and starred in award winning The Man With the Golden Arm. At the time he was best known as a television star having played the hard boiled detective Mike Hammer in a popular series.

The kid from the Tacoma orphan’s home was a major figure in American popular culture at a time when Tacoma was struggling for its own distinct identity and social balance. In a way, the attention he brought to a new thrift store in South Tacoma highlighted the increasingly fractured character of the city. In the late 1950’s, I-5 split Tacoma into separate political and economic parts followed by the creation of the Tacoma Mall in the mid 60’s that isolated and strangled the traditional downtown core and further separated neighborhoods, North and South. In the next few years following Darren McGavin’s star turn in Tacoma, the Mayor who presented him the key to Tacoma would be defeated by A.L. Slim Rasmussen from the south side. Bitter political fighting would break out and north-south tribal arguments over government control and management, open housing, civil rights, and neighborhood development would lead to a recall and overthrow of a majority of the City Council. Misguided efforts to save the downtown by tearing most of it down to build parking garages and pedestrian plazas stumbled along as blocks of merchant shops and professional office buildings were demolished. The architectural survivors, like the grand Rhodes Department Store at 11th and Broadway, became vacant and empty.

Darren McGavin

Meanwhile Darren McGavin’s star continued to rise. In 1972 he was cast as a vampire chaser in the television movie The Night Stalker which went on to become a regular series called Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Then in 1983 McGavin agreed to play Ralphie’s irascible but caring old man in A Christmas Story, a film version of writer and radio storyteller Jean Shephard’s nostalgic childhood memories of pre mall Christmas in America. In it, the old man takes both his family and the audience downtown to a time and place of department store Santas, animated display windows full of model railroad layouts and sidewalks full of Christmas shoppers and dreamers. The film is full of corny moments, painful memories and personal history remembered through a foggy but hopeful lens. It always makes me think of a kid from Dyslin’s ranch in the late 30’s standing in downtown Tacoma at Christmas.

Here’s Jean Shephard’s original Christmas story of the Red Ryder BB gun as told on the radio.